Subject:
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Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Tue, 4 Jan 2000 20:15:23 GMT
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Viewed:
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2299 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, mattdm@mattdm.org (Matthew Miller) writes:
> Todd Lehman <lehman@javanet.com> wrote:
> > And it would automatically go out to all the webpages on the net and fix up
> > the links where people say things like "discuss this on LUGNET" and give a
> > link to the article they posted?
> > And it would automatically go back through all the news articles and fix up
> > text where people said "it's article 3532 in lugnet.foo.bar"?
>
> Ah. Always a problem in the shifting sea of the web. Sites rearrange and
> break links all the time. But in this case, there's something else at work:
> The problem is that people are linking to the wrong thing. Article numbers
> are arbitrary and per-server. If you decide to make LUGnet be a distributed
> network someday, this'll be a real problem. People should be linking by
> message id.
But in order to link by message ID, you have to either serve the message by
url-encoded message ID (because people will always just cut & paste the URL)
instead of by group & number, or give people some way to click a "bookmark
or link to this" thingie that converted the group & number to an article ID
for external linking that they could use. Message ID's also can get pretty
darn long. On average they're about 30 characters here, but I've seen them
push 85 characters a few times. I suppose an alternative to a raw message
ID is a DejaNews-style thing where message ID's are mapped to a new set of
unique ID's, which, in the case of DejaNews, seem to be the set of positive
integers...it could really be any 10+ character string.
But anyway, the artifact of message ID's being the only unique ID is really
an artifact of the NNTP server-to-server transport mechanism, which doesn't
traditionally preserve article numbers within a group. It wouldn't be too
difficult someday to replicate messages via a non-NNTP link that did
preserve the article numbers, so I don't see it as a real problem.
> > And it would automatically fix bugs in newsreaders that can't deal with a
> > newsgroup having its article count set back to 0?
>
> Wouldn't happen, would it? The group would end up with an equal or greater
> number of posts.
OK, I follow you there. If you split a group foo.bar into several subgroups
and had to make foo.bar into a virtual umbrella group and had to move the
contents of foo.bar into foo.bar.general, you'd have to zero-out foo.bar.
But then it would have to fill up right away again with copies of
foo.bar.general, meaning in other words that it wouldn't actually have to be
zeroed-out after all, since you'd actually copy the articles from foo.bar to
foo.bar.general rather than moving them. OK, so that wouldn't freak out
newsreaders then. Nevermind.
--Todd
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Todd, can we have an Arctic posting group?
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| (...) Ah. Always a problem in the shifting sea of the web. Sites rearrange and break links all the time. But in this case, there's something else at work: The problem is that people are linking to the wrong thing. Article numbers are arbitrary and (...) (25 years ago, 4-Jan-00, to lugnet.admin.general)
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